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perspective of someone who’s fought in the campaign trenches
and knows that placards and pussy hats aren’t enough to beat
Republicans. “John is willing to go where we need to go,” says
his friend Laura Moser, a former Democratic congressional
candidate. “He knows we’ve got to play dirty to win.”
Burton spent election night 2016 at a dive bar in New York with
old friends from Democratic politics, revisiting a life he’d long
since left behind. After growing up in Miami and earning a
scholarship to Harvard, he’d moved to Washington to work on
economic policy at a progressive think tank. As the 2008 elec-
tion approached, his boss encouraged him to join the Obama
campaign, where his quick mind and grasp of policy would be
an asset. She had a role in mind for him. “She told me, ‘You’d
be great at oppo,’” Burton recalls. “I said, ‘What’s that?’”
As a member of Obama’s oppo team, Burton was pitted
against Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, which forced
him to master arcane issues of local concern, from hog lots to
the Colorado River Compact. It also taught him the art of sow-
ing discord to weaken an opponent. According to Burton, the
campaign purposely leaked stories critical of certain McCain
stafers, knowing the stafers would likely blame internal rivals
for the attacks. His most memorable assignment was comb-
ing property records to determine how many homes McCain
owned. When the question arose in an interview, McCain
couldn’t come up with the correct answer—eight—and looked
like an out-of-touch plutocrat rather than a maverick war hero.
After the election, Burton joined Obama’s Treasury
Department and spent a stressful year and a half ighting the
inancial crisis. “That’s when I lost my hair,” he says. In 2010
he left politics, got a degree at the Stanford Graduate School of
Business, and landed an investment banking job at JPMorgan
Chase & Co. in San Francisco, working with clients such as
Google and Twitter Inc. So certain was he that his future lay in
inance that he passed up working on Obama’s reelection and
stayed in California. His trip to New York in November 2016 was
meant to be part reunion, part celebration of Clinton’s victory.
By 9 p.m. it was clear there would be nothing to celebrate.
“Being from Miami, I could tell right away that the numbers
from Dade County were of,” Burton remembers. The next
morning, he woke up in a daze. “I stumble into the J.P. Morgan
oice in New York, and it’s just a weird vibe,” he says. “Some
people are happy, but most are scared. I was known as an
Obama guy, so it was an awkward period.”
Burton was racked with guilt that he hadn’t done his part
to stop Trump. This was somewhat alleviated when Moser
recruited him for an idea she’d had about creating a productive
outlet for the hundreds of aggrieved friends and acquaintances
who wanted to act but didn’t know how. By mid-December,
Moser had started a group called Daily Action to give
Resistance members a single, focused task, delivered via text
each morning—calling a key senator to object to a nominee, say,
or marshaling supporters at airports to protest Trump’s travel
ban. She leaned on Burton to help igure out what those tasks
should be. “John is more deeply knowledgeable about politics
and its mechanisms than anyone I’ve ever known,” she says.
Moser and Burton expected a few hundred people to sign
up but were hit with a torrent. On Day 1, Daily Action got
3,000 volunteers. By Inauguration Day, the number reached
40,000. The Women’s March pushed it past 100,000, as activ-
ists discovered, in Moser’s phrase, how to “use your phone
to ight Trump.”
The moves Burton and Moser were orchestrating gave a
sense of agency to Resisters and had tangible efects. When
the travel ban hit, they didn’t just rally supporters. They
shared the phone numbers of 189 U.S. Customs and Border
Protection oices at airports and gave callers a script say-
ing that detaining travelers was wrong and insisting they be
released. “Those little airport oices are used to getting calls
from FedEx or importers,” Burton says. “But they were the
weakest link. We told volunteers, ‘Be polite, but give them
a terrible day.’” One agent at Louis Armstrong New Orleans
International Airport was so besieged with callers, he pre-
tended to be an answering machine.
As the matter of Russian electoral meddling came to dom-
inate the news shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Burton
wanted to bring pressure on the Department of Justice.
Knowing that Washington power is driven more by mun-
dane parochial concerns than lofty idealism, he unleashed
78,000 callers not on the executive branch but on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, to demand that a special counsel be
appointed to investigate Russia. Committee senators oversee
the Justice Department and control its budget, so their pres-
sure, if applied, can’t be ignored. “The insider logic was that
this would create a huge headache for them, and they would
in turn go to the Justice Department and say, ‘Make this head-
ache go away,’ ” Burton says. Robert Mueller was appointed
special counsel soon after.
Burton was living a double life, banking by day and orga-
nizing by night—sometimes all night. “Being on the West Coast
turned out to be great, because I’d be up overnight and then
hit people with their marching orders just as they were wak-
ing up on the East Coast and reacting to the news,” he says. But
the scale of the enterprise made this schedule impossible to
sustain. Daily Action’s irst phone bill was for $40,000, which
Burton worried he’d have to help cover with his J.P. Morgan
bonus. Then, in April, as the group approached 300,000 mem-
bers, Moser announced she was moving to Texas to run for
“THE JOB FELT LIKE
SECOND NATURE,
PULLING TOGETHER DATA,
HELPING TO FIND
PHOTOS OF THE RUSSIANS
HE’D MET WITH”